Review: Neither Heaven Nor Earth

Shot on digital video and emblazoned with such impressionistic effects as the visions captured by a night-vision camera, Neither Heaven Nor Earth is a contemporary ghost story that’s both unabashedly mystical and thrillingly pulpy. While he may indulge in the occasional programmatic jump scare, writer-director Clément Cogitore ultimately heaves his debut feature closer to the realm of psychological terror, understanding that there’s nothing more frightening or darker than the human mind.

In the film, a group of French soldiers trying to secure the surroundings of an Afghan village as part of a NATO mission find themselves hostages to an unknown terrain and, increasingly, their own fears. The trouble commences almost immediately, when the battalion’s captain, Antarès Bonassieu (Jérémie Renier), faces the fact that his men are disappearing mysteriously from their posts, practically from under his nose. Bonassieu’s response is to blame the Taliban and, by turn, the locals whom he suspects of protecting the Taliban’s secrets. But as Bonassieu gets no answers, and as disappearances mount, he’s faced with the unenviable role of cutting off communication channels with the outside world, and tyrannizing his soldiers to solve the mystery. At one point, he goes as far as to take sleeping pills to help simulate what might be happening to his soldiers during the night.

Part of the film’s suspense lies in Bonassieu’s obstinacy and growing mental frailty, explored by the filmmakers almost to the point of likening the man to Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Here, too, some of the paranoia that seizes the French—a former colonial power—lies in their construction of “the other.” And Bonassieu’s devolution, like Kutz’s, shows that even the most analytical mind, backed by good intentions, is corruptible. In Neither Heaven Nor Earth, this corruption is partly justified by the brutal uncertainty of not knowing the hour of one’s death, but always sensing that it’s near.

But the real twist, and perhaps the ultimate fall, comes when Bonassieu learns that the Taliban has been suspecting him of doing the same: kidnapping their men. Thus begins an uneasy alliance of foes on opposite sides of the frontline, aligned by something even more potent than politics or religion: the immediate threat, and fear, of extermination. Bonassieu’s pact with the enemy pushes him as far as letting the Taliban terrorize the locals, doing some of the dirty work of interrogation and intimidation for him.

Some of Neither Heaven Nor Earth straightforwardly oscillates between scenes of violence and soldiers dancing and working out. In some ways, it’s a classic depiction of war, replete with ambushes, rapid exchanges of fire in vast, dry terrain that’s hostile to humans, followed by stretches of tediousness. In spite of this simplicity, we still strongly sense the psychological ballast of war: Like Bradley Cooper’s Chris Kyle from American Sniper, these French soldiers will clearly carry the war back home with them.

They will also carry the knowledge of a war’s annihilation; in one of the scenes, the soldiers stuff black bags with sheep offal, to simulate the weight of human bodies, so that the families of victims don’t know the extent to which bombs had massacred their loved ones. Other scenes, mainly of Bonassieu wrangling with the local tribal chiefs over village searches and bribes, delve into the procedurals and risks of wars such as the one in Afghanistan, where troops rely on building fragile alliances with local populations, while continuing to be disdainful and fearful of them.

During the film’s combat scenes, the use of rapid camera movements and fish-eye perspective heighten the sense of disorientation and terror. But only in the scenes where a character dons night-vision goggles does Neither Heaven Nor Earth feel more original in its storytelling and stylistic methods. The image’s green shadowy tinge, the uncertain point of view, and the blurriness retain a documentary-like veracity, while also conveying a nightmarish aura that’s heightened by the soundtrack’s eerie electronic sounds. By the time we learn that the land where the French have built their post may be haunted, full of tales of goat sacrifices, of men who go to sleep never to be found, we’re no longer sure where prejudice and local lore end and genuine madness begins.

Review: Never Fear Is Driven by Its Maker’s Personal Demons

In a 1985 interview with DeeDee Halleck conducted at the Chelsea Hotel, filmmaker Shirley Clarke stated that she made films about African-Americans as a way of working through her own ambivalence about being a woman in a male-dominated culture: “I identified with black people because I couldn’t deal with the woman question and I transposed it. I could understand very easily the black problems, and I somehow equated them to how I felt….I always felt alone, and on the outside of the culture that I was in.” One can detect a similar tendency in the work of Ida Lupino, whose independently produced dramas of the 1940s and ‘50s tackled hot-button issues such as rape, bigamy, and unwanted pregnancy. These films are no mere homilies on contemporary social problems, but complex and deeply personal explorations of what it means to be an independent woman in a world ruled by men.

Lupino’s pioneering work is suffused with a profound sense of alienation and self-doubt. Her films are about people whose conventional middle-class existence is suddenly, sometimes violently, upturned, causing them to feel completely unmoored. No longer sure of where they’re going in life or what they truly want, these people find respite away from their old life, in an unfamiliar place with a new potential lover. And Lupino tells these stories with an empathy that’s striking for its directness and lack of condescension.

Such is the case with the first film Lupino directed completely on her own, Never Fear, an emotionally complex drama about a young dancer, Carol (Sally Forrest), who seems to have it all, as she’s just gotten engaged to her partner, Guy (Keefe Brasselle), and their careers are on the verge of taking off. But then, all of sudden she’s stricken with polio, and everything changes. Carol, depressed and bitter, enters a rehab facility where she eventually makes strides toward walking again, thanks in part to the inspiration of a hunky fellow patient named Len (Hugh O’Brian). As Carol struggles with her own will to get better, she grows increasingly distant from Guy, urging him to keep pursuing his dancing career rather than settling down into a conventional job selling pre-fab “Happy Homes” as he waits around for her to recover.

Free of the noir-ish inflections Lupino brought to her other films—most notably The Hitch-Hiker, and the rape sequence in Outrage—Never Fear is directed in a simple, straightforward style that bears comparison to the stripped-down neorealism of Roberto Rossellini. Lupino is captivated by the process of physical rehabilitation, offering detailed observations of Carol’s stretching routine, swim therapy, art classes, and, in one show-stopping sequence, a square dance featuring lines of wheelchair-bound patients twirling each other around in consummately choreographed synchrony. Carol is clumsy and awkward as she struggles to operate her wheelchair, a marked contrast to the film’s opening scenes, in which Carol and Guy move together with lithe sophistication as they perform a romantic swashbuckling tango.

Never Fear’s subject matter was personal for Lupino, who survived polio after an attack in 1934. But the filmmaker isn’t merely interested in the physical ailment itself, but also in the complicated pressure that recovery places on Carol. There’s a tension in the film, which was released at the height of the U.S. polio outbreak, between what Carol wants and what the men in her life want for her. When Carol begins to reject her own treatment, it’s in part because she’s rebelling against the expectations that her doctor, her fellow patients, and especially Guy have placed on her. “Be a woman for me,” Guy asks of her, but the demand is counter-productive, as Carol can only truly recuperate when she decides to do it for herself.

In Carol’s dilemma, one can sense Lupino wrestling with her own artistic ambitions, coming to grips with the reality that as the only woman director working within the Hollywood studio system in the ‘50s, she too would have to accept the guidance of the men around her, and in so doing she would be forced to bear the weight of their expectations for her—their demands, hopes, dreams, and pity. Unfortunately, Never Fear closes with a cop-out, a last-minute reconciliation that cheapens Carol’s hard-fought struggle to learn to live on her own terms by suggesting she’s fundamentally lost without a man. Almost as if the film is embarrassed by its own denouement, the final screen assures us, “This is not THE END. It is just the beginning for all those of faith and courage.” If the film ultimately seems to question Carol’s courage, there’s at least no doubt about Lupino’s own. Never Fear wasn’t the end for her either, but merely the start of one of the most unique and pathbreaking directorial careers in Hollywood history.

WATCH: Stylish Queer Short Film Stay Makes Its Online Premiere

Writer-director Brandon Zuck’s sexy and stylish gay thriller Stay made its premiere on the film festival circuit back in 2013, but the L.A.-based filmmaker is finally debuting it for free online. The short film, which Zuck claims is loosely based on events from his past, follows Ash (Brandon Harris) and his ex-boyfriend, Jacks (Julian Brand), on a road trip to the Florida Keys where the pair get mixed up in a fatal drug deal.

“I think maybe I was holding onto the film because it’s such a part of me,” Zuck says about his decision to release Stay on YouTube, which has been criticized by queer creators and organizations like GLAAD for ever-changing content guidelines that appear to target content made by and for LGBT people.

“YouTube started age-restricting my other LGBT films and—to be totally honest—I got furious. YouTube is this faceless behemoth and there’s nothing someone like me can do to fight any of it directly. Really the only thing I could think of was just putting more queer content out there. And Stay was sitting right there on my desktop where it’s always been. So I just hit upload. And it got age-restricted. C’est la vie. Next.”

Review: The Resonant Tito and the Birds Wants Us to Reject Illusion

In several ways, Gabriel Bitar, André Catoto, and Gustavo Steinberg’s Tito and the Birds offers relief from the impersonal assault of contemporary pop culture. Instead of the sanitized, disposably “perfect” computer animation that gluts children’s TV shows and films, Tito and the Birds weds digital technology with oil painting, abounding in hallucinatory landscapes that casually morph to reflect the emotions of the narrative’s protagonists. This Brazilian animated feature has the warm, handmade quality of such adventurous modern children’s films as Henry Selick’s Coraline and Mark Osborne’s The Little Prince.

Tito and the Birds’s artisanal tactility is also inherently political, as it invites consumers or consumers-in-training not to mindlessly gobble jokes, plot, and branding opportunities by the yard, but to slow down and contemplate the sensorial experience of what they’re watching. For instance, it can be difficult to recall now that even middling Disney animated films of yore once seemed beautiful, and that the studio’s classics are ecstatic explosions of neurotic emotion. These days, Disney is in the business of packaging hypocritically complacent stories of pseudo-empowerment, which are viscerally dulled by workmanlike aesthetics that deliberately render our consumption painless and unmemorable.

In this climate, the wild artistry of Tito and the Birds amounts to a bucket of necessary cold water for audiences. Throughout the film’s shifting landscapes, one can often discern brushstrokes and congealed globs of paint, which are deliberate imperfections that underscore painting, and by extension animation, as the endeavors of humans. And this emphasis on the humanity of animation underscores the fulfilling nature of collaborative, rational, nurturing community, which is also the theme of the film’s plot.

Like the United States and much of Europe, Brazil is falling under the sway of far-right politics, which sell paranoia as justification for fascism, and for which Tito and the Birds offers a remarkably blunt political allegory. The world of this narrative is gripped by a disease in which people are paralyzed by fright: In terrifying images, we see arms shrinking and eyes growing wide with uncomprehending terror, until the bodies curl up into fleshy, immobile stones that are the size of a large knapsack. Characters are unsure of the cause of the “outbreak,” though the audience can discern the culprit to be the hatred spewing out of a Fox News-like TV channel, which sells an illusion of rampant crime in order to spur people to buy houses in expensive communities that are fenced in by bubbles. Resonantly, the network and real estate are owned by the same rich, blond sociopath.

Ten-year-old Tito (Pedro Henrique) is a bright and sensitive child who’s traumatized by the disappearance of his father, a scientist who sought to build a machine that would reconnect humankind with birds. Like his father, Tito believes that birds can save the world from this outbreak of hatred, and this evocatively free-associative conceit underscores the hostility that far-right parties have toward the environment, which they regard as fodder for hunting grounds, plunder-able resources, and parking lots. In a heartbreakingly beautiful moment, a pigeon, a working-class bird, begins to sing, and its song resuscitates Tito’s friend, also pointedly of a lower class than himself, from a frozen state of fear and hopelessness.

As the birds come to sing their song, the landscapes lighten, suggesting the emotional and cultural transcendence that might occur if we were to turn off our TVs, phones, and laptops more often and do what the recently deceased poet Mary Oliver defined as our “endless and proper work”: pay attention—to ourselves, to others, to the wealth of other life we take for granted and subsequently fail to be inspired by. Inspiration has the potentiality to nullify fear, but it doesn’t sell as many action figures as the frenetic velocity of embitterment and violence.

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